Ms. Goodman has a BA in History & Art History, and a Masters in Library and Information Studies
both from McGill University, and has done graduate work in Jewish history at Concordia
University as part of the MA in Judaic Studies degree program, where she focused Medieval & Modern
Judaism and her thesis focused on American Jewish History & Southern Jewish History, particularly
Jews life during the Civil War. She also has a DCS in Communications, with an emphasis on the
Fine Arts from Vanier College.

Ms. Goodman had contributed to the news sections of Military History and Vietnam Magazines, and was also the former Editor/Features Editor for the History News Network (HNN), and had
worked for HNN from 2004-2010.

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All posts for the month July, 2006

What They’re Famous For

Harold M. Hyman is William P. Hobby Professor of History, Emeritus, and director of the Center for the History of Leadership Institutions at Rice University, and is best known for his work on the legal and constitutional climates of the mid- to late-nineteenth-century United States. He is author of several books and articles on the Civil War and Reconstruction, Abraham Lincoln, internal security evolution, civilian-military relationships, and the impact of modern law firms. His Era of the Oath: Northern Loyalty Tests during the Civil War and Reconstruction (1954), won the American Historical Association’s Beveridge Prize. Hyman has lectured and taught at major universities, law schools, and think tanks, and is past president of the American Society for Legal History.

In 1997 on the occassion of being named Professor Emeritus and his partial retirement from Rice University where Hyman stopped teaching undergraduate courses but continued graduate courses and PhD advising, Hyman told Rice University News and Media Relations: “So far it doesn’t seem to be any different. I love teaching. I love being around students. [Becoming a professor emeritus] is a little like other milestones in life-being born, getting married… The only thing I know is being a historian…. [Rice has] been a very good place in almost every way-good students, good colleagues. By and large, the administration encouraged one to do what one should be doing-teaching and writing-and didn’t intrude.”

Personal Anecdote

Many Depression-decade high school dropouts enlisted in the pre-Pearl Harbor military. In mid-1941 I joined the Marines. That December, Imperial Japan attacked me, serially and seriously, on Oahu, Midway and Guadalcanal islands and elsewhere. I resented these sporadic and dangerous intrusions personally, for two reasonable reasons. First, Japan’s assaults might have impaired me physically. Second, the aggressive Japanese tactics repeatedly disrupted our military mail service.

The latter consequence irked me primarily because, as Japan’s troops and my Marine duties permitted, I was trying to master high school completion courses, by correspondence. Even when stationed too briefly in Australia and New Zealand I bypassed the many beckoning bars, bimbos, and brothels in order to work on those demanding lessons, with growing enthusiasm for those in history. In addition to preserving my virtue this belated studiousness paid off, I assumed, when, in 1944, I, again encamped on a Pacific atoll, received by mail a glossy New York high school diploma.

Sadly, I learned later that my abstention from wartime sins was superfluous. Without informing me, in 1943 or `44 New York had granted diplomas without course completions to all ultimately uniformed high school dropouts.

So, to more autobiography. Once again a civilian, I found that my wartime experiences, including the prophylactic correspondence courses, had unfitted me for the blue-collar ruts my several siblings accepted. By mid-1946 I was married (still am, to the same splendid lady) and earning a superior salary. But while attending evening junior college classes I rediscovered my war-kindled interest in history and quit my job. Financed by my breadwinning wife and the GI Bill, by 1948 I had a BA from UCLA, then, in 1952, a Columbia University PhD, both in history. Faculty positions followed, at Earlham College (where, with a PhD, I earned less in 1952 than I had, when a high school graduate, in 1946), Arizona State, UCLA, Illinois, and, in 1968, an endowed chair at Rice University.

I retired from Rice in 1997 because, as the fall term began, a freshman asked me if, long ago, I had taught at UCLA. My affirmative reply triggered his response that, forty-plus years earlier, his future grandfather (!!) had taken my US Constitutional & Legal History course and now sent regards. It was time.

For me, however, it proved not to be a good time. My encrusted habit was to work hard. For five decades, I, in addition to teaching, had published a baker’s dozen well- received books and many articles, essays, papers, etc. Retirement, I assumed, would mean unimpeded opportunity for further research and writing.

But, once becoming a retired octogenarian, I fell prey to squads of surgeons, phalanxes of physicians, and platoons of pharmacists. They, and the federal pharmaceutical boondoggle of 2005-6, consumed my time, energy, and funds. My ambitious post-retirement research and writing plans wither. Since retiring I’ve published only some scholarly articles, op-ed essays especially about Iraq and domestic civil liberties, and book reviews, and evaluated manuscripts for publishers. Too physically uncertain to kayak and fish as I had also hoped to do, by default I look backward a lot.

I look back less to the generations of undergraduates who, voluntarily or not, endured my lectures and exams, than to the roughly sixty PhDs and MAs whose theses and dissertations I had the privilege to oversee. They and I taught each other a lot.

When I taught successfully they learned to ask significant questions of the past, to find through patient research relevant facts to justify reasonable judgments about worthy topics, and to express themselves clearly (passive voice and technical gobbledygook prohibited). I urged each graduate student to think of a dissertation as a book a-borning. It had first to survive seminar criticisms, then those of anonymous external referees, and, when appropriate, then deserve my positive recommendations to a publisher that it become a book. I emphasized the advantages a new PhD gained by retaining a dissertation’s core topic and perhaps widening its chronological coverage and/or employing alternative supplemental interpretations, perhaps by this means conceiving a second book or other major publication.

It worked for a pride of “my” PhD’s. They taught me a great deal, especially through their distinguished, topically linked, yet disparate studies in broadly defined areas of American constitutional and legal history. Their writings help better to illuminate many endlessly contentious paths to our present, paths that include gender and race equality, war powers, Lincoln, the Civil War and Reconstruction, civil-military relationships, loyalty-security policies, federalism (including city-state), control of epidemics, and judicial biography.

Despite their achievements and my own, my frustrated post-retirement research and writing plans now inspire a curmudgeon’s sour closing notes, especially about technology’s impacts on higher education. Remember my earnest wartime devotions in pursuit of a high school diploma? Today, nominally academic entities hire cadres of e-mail peddlers to tout the effortless acquisitions of secondary school diplomas, BAs. MAs, and even PhDs. In legitimate collegiate institutions undergraduates and graduate students easily muster long rosters of primary and secondary sources with which to decorate footnotes and bibliographies. What insights, I worry, have the students gained? As a retiree I’m pleased not to have to sit in on the unending committees that now grope toward some self-respecting accomodation with these and derivative problems. But mine is a guilty pleasure. My instinct was to enlist in frays. Now I can not.

Muted, I wonder when I try to balance my emotions with calmer reason, are these technological marvels in research aids less problems than opportunities, as many respected colleagues insist? And, I ask as historian, is electronic data retrieval fundamentally more upsetting than was true of libraries’ innovative card catalogs a century ago?

Damn. History again intrudes its disturbing questions that blunt excessively simple responses to changes.

Quotes

By Harold M. Hyman

Historians have attended more to victims’ assertions of unmerited injuries than to justifications by officials, a sensitivity which reflects attitudes of our time, when the suggestion that Staatsrecht was ever an adequate reason for imposition of any security procedures is shrugged away because strong suspicion exists that, currently, such devices are overblown.However deserving this judgment may be about today’s restraints, extrapolation of similar judgments to 1861-65 presents substantial difficulties. The question of feasible alternatives to what came in after the Sumter bombardment has received little attention. Actual disloyalty existed in dangerous quantity and frightening concentration; some security measures were in order or else efforts were wasted to restore by arms the disrupting union of states. A society resentful of restraints was unlikely to accept unnecessary security fetters as passively as proved to be the case. False pleas of necessity could scarcely have convinced alert, selfappointed monitors of American institutions, morals, and ways.

The notion that officials could act secretly or mask excesses with fictions of mythical underground conspiracies was dubious at best. The antidisloyalty recourses of the Lincoln Administration were imperfect and galling; but they were neither irrelevant nor cynical. — Harold Hyman in “A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution”

“The oaths did not identify the loyalty of federal pensioners. Well into the twentieth century the government continued its investigations of pension claims arising from the Civil War. Literally thousands of cases involved the definition of wartime loyalty. Proof or disproof rested not, upon oaths, but upon evidence. Nor did test oaths serve to identify the Southern Unionist, as the Southern Claims Commission learned when it labored for nine years to that end. The Commission came to disregard oaths as a matter of form, and to depend upon evidence to prove a claimant’s wartime Unionism. Of the thirty-four “standing interrogatories” which the Commission asked every claimant, only one concerned his willingness to swear to his past loyalty. And in many cases this requirement was waived in the light of local conditions which might have made a Southerner, however ardent a Unionist, give momentary aid to the Confederacy. Yet that same Southerner (to whom Congress paid federal funds after the Claims Commission approved his appeal) stood barred from federal employment, office, and juries because of a test oath of past loyalty. The jurors’ test oath was as much a failure as an identification of loyalty as any of the Civil War tests. Enforced diligently almost anywhere in the South, it crippled the courts. Unenforced as it came to be, it was a mere form, to which Southerners swore unthinkingly and uncaringly. And not one prosecution for the many perjuries ever arose, even when Radicals controlled the federal courts in the South.And so they failed, these loyalty tests of the Civil War and Reconstruction, for they did not measure loyalty. They failed for the nation, were condemned by the courts, and eventually were discarded. They failed also in the states, where the courts invalidated them or constitutional and legal reform repealed them. They failed, for as Samuel Butler said in Hudibras :

He that imposes an oath makes it,
Not he that for convenience takes it;
Then how can any man be said
To break an oath he never made?
– Harold Hyman in “Era of the Oath: Northern Loyalty Tests During the Civil War and Reconstruction” “

“Meanwhile Lewis Stanton had commissioned his father’s friend George C. Gorham, former Secretary of the U. S. Senate, to write a biography. An intimate of the Stanton family, G. A. Mendall, confided to Frank A. Flower, a young Wisconsinite who was also interested in preparing a life of Stanton, that “Gorham is a pungent, bitter writer. . . . [There will be] a good deal more Gorham than Stanton in it.” And so it proved to be. When the two-volume Gorham book appeared in 1899, it fell far short of the hopes of the Stanton family and admirers, though it was a totally favorable view of its subject. In a review, George W. Julian unhappily admitted that “this is not the final Life of Edwin M. Stanton,” and concluded that Gorham had prepared “a healthy and inspiring story” for young people. Gorham’s Stanton remains, however, an indispensable source collection, for the author never returned to the Hutchison branch of the Stanton family the large number of manuscripts he had received from them to aid him in his task, some of which appear in the book.In 1905, using materials supplied by the Lamson members of the family, Flower published a Stanton biography. Stanton’s cousin, the wartime Ohio legislator Benjamin Stanton, after reading some of Flower’s manuscript, was sure that “you hit the character of Stanton exactly.” But Flower was no more capable than Gorham of delineating character or of constructively balancing conflicting pieces of evidence. He was a warm admirer of the War Secretary, and his book is as onesided a defense of its subject as its predecessor. Also, like Gorham, Flower failed to return to the Stanton family the papers he had received from them.

Six years later, the diary of Gideon Welles went into print. Its caustic assertions concerning Stanton’s role in public affairs and his alleged inadequacies in matters of character made an immediate and lasting impression. Jesse Weik admitted that it had “completely upset my notion of Seward, Stanton, and Grant. I have always been such an admirer of all three that I sometimes regret that I ever read Mr. Welles’ estimate. But the great thing is his vindication of Andrew Johnson.”

The vindication of Johnson continued for the next forty years, almost without contradiction. Then, in 1953, Fletcher Pratt published his study of Stanton, which, although it corrected some tenacious misapprehensions, did not provide the needed full study of his life. There, until now, the Stanton story has rested. — Harold Hyman in “Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War”

“Even more questionable is the thesis that a loyalty-security system is necessary at all. That the present apparatus has been conceived in haste and nourished in a substandard partisan environment is patent. There can be no doubt that it has been a major factor in the unsavory tendencies toward a fearful conformity which have marked the domestic American scene since the victorious close of World War II. Social tensions, translated into political pressures, brought loyalty-testing perilously close to disrupting much in the American system of government which the loyalty-security system was designed to protect.But the executive departments must protect themselves against future espionage and infiltration as well as against past acts. Indeed, fear of the past and the future, rather than judicious consideration of the present, has been the major obstacle to effective executive loyaltytesting. At no time have any of the federal agencies supplied the primary need of a valid loyalty program–a definition, a standard, a viable agreement on what loyalty is. Lacking this prerequisite, subjectivity, partisanship, sheer stupidity, and vindictiveness in the operation of the executive system have justified the criticisms made of it.

Defining loyalty is a philosophical problem. The difficulties involved in its realization are endless. Men in the present and past have ignored this need. They relied on loyalty oaths and other tests which prescribed absolutes of past conduct for suspected disloyalists. Mere emulation of the past in an uncritical search for security in the future is to turn a deaf ear to history and to the present needs of political democracy involved in unprecedented crisis. If executive officials have advanced beyond Lincoln’s use of loyalty-oath tests, they have not yet reached Lincoln’s calm appraisal of human nature and democracy’s resiliency: “On principle, I dislike an oath which requires a man to swear he has not done wrong. It rejects the Christian principle of forgiveness on terms of repentance. I think it enough if a man does no wrong hereafter. ” …

Three decades ago, William Butler Yeats offered this doleful prophecy of mid-century life:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Herman Melville was more hopeful almost a century ago when, as civil war and mass disloyalty rent the land, he offered this poetical plea for moderation and humility:

Yea and Nay–
Each hath his say;
But God he keeps the middle way.
None was by
When He spread the sky;
Wisdom is vain, and prophesy.

Between Melville’s humanistic skepticism and Yeats’s dreary pessimism rests the measure of the current generation, seeking absolutes of loyalty and of much else. Absolute security, as Justice Holmes said in another connection, is achieved only in the graveyard. Never in America’s history have loyalty tests provided security. That security has emerged from within, from strengths garnered by lives and sacrifices freely offered. Until the past history of the inutility of loyalty tests to provide loyalty is recognized, American unity and Americans’ rights will suffer. — Harold Hyman in “To Try Men’s Souls: Loyalty Tests in American History”

Hyman, who has served as president of the American Society for Legal History for the past two years and vice president two years before that, has been a history professor at Rice for 27 years. For him, interacting with the younger generation through his association gives him great satisfaction. More specifically, several of his former history doctoral students are set to present papers at the association’s annual meeting, which will be held in Houston later this month.
“It’s a very good feeling to see intellectual offspring doing good things,” Hyman said. “Being president is a wonderful experience. It’s gratifying to see that so many of them [younger members] are energetic and talented. So there’s no reason to cry about the younger generation.”
The society is a national as well as international scholarly society made up of about 2,000 members who share an interest in the history of law and the constitution. Members include historians of law, law academics, law practitioners, judges, social scientists and “a scattering of wonderful amateurs” from all 50 states and abroad, Hyman said.
“This society is one of few forums where practicing lawyers and academics [historians] can come together,” Hyman said. “The best experience is just to see the seriousness members take. We create this arena where people can talk that otherwise wouldn’t talk. And we encourage that.”
The society has made important contributions to scholarship with papers on race, gender, law, legal rights in wartime, among others, Hyman said.
“We’ve learned a great deal out of the research this society encourages,” he said. “I’ve been honored to be elected.”
Hyman has been a member of the society for 45 years and will pass along the title in late October at the annual meeting. — Harold Hyman in a Rice Univerity article on the occassion of his retirement from the presidency of the American Society for Legal History

About Harold M. Hyman

“For more than a generation J. G. Randall’s Constitutional Problems under Lincoln (first published in 1926 and revised in 1951) has stood alone in its field, so exhausative in its research, so authoritative in its judgments as to be the virtually unquestioned on the constitutional history of the Civil war era. Now Randall’s work faces a serious challenger in Harold M. Hyman’s A More Perfect Union, a comprehensive reinterpretation of American constitutional developments during the 1860s… To examine these and other major differences would require a book at least as long as Randall’s or Hyman’s. It is enough here to say that both books have great merit. On technical matters, such as legislative history and provisions of the several confiscations acts, students will continue to turn to Randall’s precise and elegant chapters. For the broader intellectual, social and political background of such legislation, they must consult Hyman. In short, Randall’s study has not yet been replaced, but it finally has in Hyman’s book a worthy companion on the shelf of indispensible books on American constitutional history.” — David Herbert Donald reviewing “A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution” in the “Journal of American History”

“This is “Civil War and Reconstruction” constitutional history in a new key. Although the author deals with a number of constitutional problems that Randall and his contemporaries touched upon nearly two generations ago, his focus of interest is different….Hyman is concerned above all with the fashion in which the sucessive shocks of secessions and the subsequent suppression of a large-scale rebellion transformed the living constitutional system into a dynamic instrument adequate to all the exigencies of battle, conquest, occupation, emancipation, and finally reconstruction that sucessive crises called for….All this is excellent….But Hyman’s study, in aggegate assessment, must be set down as superior work. — Alfred H. Kelly reviewing “A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution” n the “Journal of Southern History”

Brilliantly displays every characteristic of a definitive study–depth, range, detail, point of view, and lucidity….Disposes, once and for all, of the durable myth of [Stanton’s] complicity in Lincoln’s assassination, and clarifies, to a large extent, his highly complicated role in the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. — New Yorker reviewing “Stanton, the Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War”

“Union and Confidence: The 1860s is the third volume in “a retrodspective series” commissioned by Dun and Bradstreet Companies, Inc. Harold Hyman, among the nations better-known Civil War historians, was requested to probe “the business aspect of the 1860s as well as the political and social history of the era.” …The book, in a measure, is a compilation of generalizations, stated forthrightly and competently…. All Civil War historians will not agree with every interpretative comment or generalization. Some will disgree with more than others-and that is the way it should be. But all will welcome Union and Confidence as a provocative and scholarly book. — Frank L. Klement reviewing “Union and Confidence: The 1860s” in “American Historical Review”

“This is constitutional history as it should be written, but seldom is. Combining an excellent sketch of Chase’s life with the social, intellectual, and moral climate of the times, Hyman provides a brilliant analysis of two landmark decisions. He also presents a stimulating, original, and provocative treatment of the Chase Court that sheds new light on our understanding of the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments.” — John Niven, editor of The Salmon P. Chase Papers reviewing “The Reconstruction Justice of Salmon P. Chase In Re Turner and Texas v. White”

“Hyman set out to tell the story of the powerful Houston law firm Vinson and Elkins as an exercise in legal history, a field that he believes is the poorer for its lack of good histories of firms; this lack, he suggests, is primarily due to the difficulty that historians face in gaining access to firm records. Although many scholars have faced this problem, Hyman has been amazingly successful in his own efforts to find a firm agreeable to giving him access to personnel and records on a fairly impressive scale… All in all, six hundred dense pages is an awful lot of reading for the history of just one law firm. The patient reader is, however, rewarded with a comprehensive sweep to the tale and with a fair view of the changes in the firm and in the law and politics that its lawyers practiced. — Steve Sheppard reviewing “Craftsmanship and Character: A History of the Vinson & Elkins Law Firm of Houston, 1917-1997″

Basic Facts

Teaching Positions:
City College (now City College of the City University of New York), New York, NY, instructor in modern history, 1950-52;
Earlham College, Richmond, IN, assistant professor of history, 1952-55;
University of California, Los Angeles, visiting assistant professor of American history, 1955- 56;
Arizona State University, Tempe, associate professor of American history, 1956-57;
University of California, Los Angeles, professor of history, 1963-68;
Rice University, Houston, TX, William P. Hobby Professor of History, 1968–, chairman of history department, 1968-70.

Editor, with Stuart Bruchey, of the “American Legal and Constitutional History Series,” Garland Publishing, 1986-87. Member of board of editors, Reviews in American History, 1964–, Ulysses S. Grant Association, 1968– American Journal of Legal History, 1970–, and Journal of American History, 1970-74.

Awards and Grants:

Albert J. Beveridge award, American Historical Association, 1952, and Sidney Hillman award both for Era of the Oath: Northern Loyalty Tests During the Civil War and Reconstruction;
Sidney Hillman award for To Try Men’s Souls: Loyalty Tests in American History.

Peter W. Galbraith: THE END OF IRAQ How American Incompetence Created a War Without End, First Chapter – NYT, 7-30-06

Fouad Ajami: THE FOREIGNER’S GIFT The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq. First Chapter – NYT, 7-30-06

Thomas E. Ricks: The March of Folly A damning new book by a Post Pentagon reporter shows how Iraq fell into chaos FIASCO The American Military Adventure in Iraq – Washington Post, 7-30-06

Jed Horne: The Drowning A New Orleans newspaper editor chronicles the devastation of his hometown. BREACH OF FAITH Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City – Washington Post, 7-30-06

David Garrow: A shameful racist pattern along the Mason-Dixon Line – 7-29-06 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 7-29-06

QUOTED:

John Gomez on “85 years before Sept. 11, there was Black Tom Island”: “There was no question about Black Tom being an act of terror, and I believe the Germans were responsible . . . but the case has never truly been solved. I think the real answers are still in Germany.” – AP, 7-30-06

C-Span2, BookTV: Book TV presents After Words: Thomas Ricks, author of “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq,” interviewed by Col. Jeffrey McCausland (US Army-retired), Sunday, July 30 at 5:50 pm and at 8:55 pm – C-Span2, BookTV

C-Span2, BookTV: Book TV presents Mark Danner The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War’s Buried History, Sunday, July 30 at 12:00 pm and at 11:00 pm and Monday, July 31 at 5:00 am – C-Span2, BookTV

C-Span2, BookTV: Book TV presents Ramesh Ponnuru with Eric Cohen The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life, Sunday, July 30 at 4:00 pm and Monday, July 31 at 6:30 am – C-Span2, BookTV

Julian Zelizer on Bush’s Record: One Veto, Many No’s: “President Bush has vetoed things without vetoing them. He’s kind of found alternative ways in which he can basically say no to Congress without publicly saying no, or publicly having the confrontation.” – NYT, 7-23-06

History Channel coming in November 2006: Desperate Crossing: the Untold Story of the Mayflower -

C-Span2, BookTV: Book TV presents After Words: Simon Schama, author of “Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution” interviewed by Edna Medford, Howard University history professor, Sunday, July 23 at 6:00 pm and at 9:00 pm – C-Span2, BookTV

C-Span2, BookTV: Book TV presents After Words: Thomas Ricks, author of “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq,” interviewed by Col. Jeffrey McCausland (US Army-retired), Saturday, July 29 at 9:00 pm and on Sunday, July 30 at 6:00 pm and on Sunday, July 30 at 9:00 pm – C-Span2, BookTV

Michael Kazin on Debby Applegate: The Gospel of Love The Most Famous Man in America – NYT, 7-16-06

Debby Applegate: The Most Famous Man in America, First Chapter – NYT, 7-16-06

John Strausbaugh: The All-American Skin Game Americans’ racial obsessions, on page, stage and screen BLACK LIKE YOU Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture – Washington post, 7-16-06

Rodney Bolt: Lorenzo’s Toil How the son of an impoverished leatherworker came to write Mozart’s libretti THE LIBRETTIST OF VENICEWashington post, 7-16-06

Don Ritchie, an associate historian for the U.S. Senate on Deborah Pryce May Pay a Price for Her Role as a House Republican Leader: “It’s the problem you have as a party leader: The nation is watching you, and contributions are flowing to your opponent from people who don’t like you and want to remove you. It can be an extra burden rather than an extra glory.” – Bllomberg, 7-13-06

Michael Dugan on Mike Huckabee contemplating a run for the Republican presidential nomination: “The advantage of Huckabee was that he did not come from northwest Arkansas. The regionalization of the party could be its undoing once Huckabee and Rockefeller are no longer on the scene. The Republican Party from northwest Arkansas may be singing to its Taliban choir up there, but it’s not going to carry extensively around the state.” – Arkansas News, 7-16-06

Debby Applegate: The Gospel of Love By the 1850s, an inspiring Brooklyn preacher was breaking new ground in celebrity and faith THE MOST FAMOUS MAN IN AMERICA The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher – Washington Post, 7-9-06

James Green: Haymarket historian Putting labor movement riot into context 120 years later Death in The Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America – nwitimes.com, 7-5-06

Gil Troy on Open Race Raises Names For Election 2008: “What makes 2008 so interesting is that we have a completely wide-open field in the age of totally democratized primaries….To have that kind of chaos on both sides is really quite destabilizing.” – AP, 7-5-06

EVENTS CALENDER:

July 11, 2006: The city of Negaunee will be holding its 27th annual Pioneer Days Russell Magnaghi presents “History of food origins in Marquette County” and John Anderton presents “Native Americans and the discovery of Iron Ore in Negaunee” at the Negaunee History Museum – Marquette Mining Journal, MI, 7-9-06

July 25, 2006: Richard Labunski speaking about his new book James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights @ Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington at 7 p.m – UK News – Kentucky, 6-20-06

ON TV:

C-Span2, BookTV: Book TV presents David Oshinsky Polio: An American Story, Sunday, July 9 at 7:00 pm and Monday, July 10 at 5:00 am – C-Span2, BookTV

James Green: Historian attempts to put Haymarket affair in context after 120 years Death in The Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America – Canada.com, 6-29-06

David Garrow on the Early Supreme Court Consensus Fades: “We’re almost certain to see next term an emphasis on those areas, namely abortion and race, where Kennedy is measurably more conservative than O’Connor in ways that likely will be utterly decisive.” – AP, 7-02-06

Lisa A. Lindsay, 39

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Associate Professor, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, July 2004-present (Assistant Professor, 1999-2004)Area of Research: Lindsay teaches broadly in African history, but her research focuses primarily on the social history of West Africa, particularly Nigeria.Education: Ph.D. in History (African), University of Michigan, 1996Major Publications: Lindsay is author of Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria (Heinemann, 2003), and the coeditor with Stephan F. Miescher of Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa (Heinemann, 2003). She is currently working on Captives as Commodities: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (a textbook under contract with Prentice Hall, to be published in 2007). More recently, and inspired by her teaching on the Atlantic slave trade, Lindsay has been researching the story of a South Carolina ex-slave who in the 1850s migrated to his father’s place of origin in what is now Nigeria. During the 2004-05 academic year she was pursuing this project as a fellow at the National Humanities Center.Awards: Lindsay is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including:
Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Article Prize (for “Domesticity and Difference,” AHR, 1999);
UNC Spray-Randleigh Fellowship, 2006;
American Council of Learned Societies Ryskamp Fellowship, 2005-07;
National Humanities Center fellow, 2004-05;
UNC Center for International Studies Faculty Curriculum Development Grant, 2004;
UNC Junior Faculty Development Grant, 2003;
UNC University Research Council Grant, 2002 and 2006;
ACLS research fellowship, spring 2001;
National Endowment for the Humanities research fellowship, fall 2000.Additional Info:
Formerly Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 1997-99, and Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of History and Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan, 1996-97.

Personal Anecdote

White American girls typically do not dream of becoming historians of Africa; nor did I. But growing up in Louisiana in the civil rights era, I couldn’t help but notice the legacies of race and slavery-in the newly-integrated public schools I attended, as well as in the jazz and blues I was learning to play on the saxophone. Later in college and graduate school, I discovered an Africa that was historically connected to me as an American, somewhat familiar to me as a Southerner, and endlessly fascinating to me as a member of the human community.

In the mid-1980s, while I studied international politics at Johns Hopkins University, half a world away apartheid South Africa exploded in street demonstrations and government terror. The semester I took my first African history course, I was arrested with hundreds of others for protesting in front of the South African Embassy in Washington. My comrades and I built a shanty town on the Hopkins quad to urge divestment from South African stocks, and we even took our “port-a-shanty” to sully the premises of offending banks. My political indignation reflected my growing sense that Africa deserved Americans’ attention and fueled my curiosity about the many ways Africans and Americans have been connected in the past.

As a graduate student I concentrated on the history of West Africa because in comparison to South Africa its recent past seemed rather less terrible, and because I had a vague sense that the slave trade had given American Southerners and Atlantic Africans something of a shared history. Since 1991, when I traveled to Nigeria for the first time, I have often noticed its similarities to southern Louisiana. My family’s homeland is swampy, hot, and humid, with loquacious storytellers, lively music, thirsty mosquitoes, and spicy stews. In and around Lagos I found a region that is swampy, hot, and humid, where raconteurs share proverbs, music travels through the night air, mosquitoes never give up, and fiery pepper soup makes Tabasco seem like Cool-Aid. And then there’s the petroleum-soaked political corruption, but maybe now I’m reaching!

The year I lived in Nigeria conducting dissertation research (1993-94), I witnessed three changes of government, two general strikes, countless fuel shortages, and a military coup. I got sick with dysentery, mysterious rashes, and malaria; scabies infected my hands and arms when I worked in a particularly dusty archive. (Flea soap did the trick.) The apartment my husband and I lived in had not been inhabited for a decade, and even after we renovated it there were daily electricity outages and weeks without running water. But people looked after us, as so often happens in Africa, offering care and support as well as adventures. It was through one friend that I got to play saxophone with Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Africa’s most innovative and radical pop star, whose politically-charged, infectiously danceable music I had first come to love when I heard it in Baltimore.

Its vibrant rhythms-in music as well as in the daily human pursuits of survival, connection, and delight-are what propel my scholarship in West African history. In the classroom and on paper I try to convey both the distinctiveness of African history and the connections shared between Africa and the rest of the world. My first book was fundamentally comparative, placing southern Nigeria’s gendered labor history in a wider context. My current project emphasizes the links within one family’s history between West Africa and the United States. The goal in all of this work is to intrigue students and readers with what makes Africa different from America and at the same time provoke their empathy for fellow humans half a world away.

Quotes

By Lisa A. Lindsay

This book’s underlying concern is with a broad issue: what effect does the expansion of wage labor have on relationships between men and women and on understandings about how women and men structure their lives? Is the normative pattern that emerged in Western Europe and North America, with men working for wages and women reproducing the household in unpaid labor at home, a universal one? Does long-term wage labor necessarily become a male preserve over time? … Fundamentally, these are questions about the social reproduction of labor. …

… [I]n southwestern Nigeria the gendered ideals implicit in colonial policies met an equally powerful but very different body of assumptions about the respective roles of men and women.

While the colonial state created the conditions under which nearly all wage jobs were filled by men, this did not mean that it turned men into the major providers for their wives and children, especially since most people did not work for wages and women had access to their own [trading] incomes. … For trade unionists and individual wage earners, the image of male providers was useful for making demands from the colonial state, even it if sat uneasily with women’s important economic activities. At home, steady wages and the breadwinner ideal had implications for men’s marital relationships, household budgets, and self-esteem, even if those budgets were partially kept afloat through women’s contributions. And in negotiations over household resources, women drew upon the fledgling male breadwinner norm to make their own claims to men’s paychecks…. [T]he disjunctures as well as the overlaps between discourse and practice surrounding the male breadwinner norm in southwestern Nigeria suggest not only that people shape their lives according to ideas about gender, but that they shape expressions of gender in order to better their lives. — Lisa A. Lindsay in “Working with Gender”

“The 1945 [Nigerian general] strike reveals the gendered nature of colonial discrimination, and opposition to it, in Africa….In Nigeria, as in the rest of the continent, the question of applying universalistic principles to colonial workers was related to what kind of men they were and what kind of households they should live in. … Colonizers used local gender relations and household structures as justifications for racial discrimination in wage setting. At the same time, working men claimed political rights in gendered terms. … The conflicts and debates surrounding the 1945 Nigerian general strike show that tensions between universalizing impulses and African particularities, key to postwar colonial politics, rested in large part on gender and family life-for both colonial officials and African workers. In spite of the active participation of Nigerian women in politics and the economy, the male breadwinner ideal came to stand for respectability and rights, in the colony as in the metropole.” — Lisa A. Lindsay in “Domesticity and Difference,” AHR 104, 3 (June 1999)”

About Lisa A. Lindsay

“In this carefully documented archival and field research study, Lindsay takes on the literature about labor in the African formal sector through the lens of the social history of Nigerian railway workers. The choice is an inspired one…. As the title announces, the key theme is gender and domestic life. Here Lindsay presents a more historically nuanced interpretation than others, largely by including the place of the family in labor struggles for pay, benefits and working conditions alongside a social history of workers’ family life….By maintaining her own theme, Lindsay is able to give full play to her archival and interview material to show the internal complexities of the familial imagery that made it such a key resource…. This excellent study allows us to consider such a possibility, and to follow the implications for the analysis of economic life in the turbulent present.” — Jane I. Guyer reviewing “Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria”

“This collection of essays by twelve distinguished African, African-American, Euro-American, and European historians (plus two anthropologists and one scholar of religion) examines the construction of gender roles in twentieth-century sub-Saharan Africa. With two exceptions—an essay about Nigerian men in the 1990s and another about a female king in Nigeria—the essays are about the interaction of African men as workers, herders, teachers, soldiers, policemen, and nationalists with colonial authorities, missionaries, and colonists. The collection includes chapters covering eight countries of East, West, and Southern Africa (four are about Nigeria and two about Ghana). The theme threading through the volume is the ways in which African men responded to colonial policies that affected, and in some cases profoundly changed, their traditional gender roles…. The editors write that gender—male and female—is “crucial to understanding the history of modern Africa, its women, and its men” (p. 22). Beyond understanding, there is a need for insights into the ways these superb studies of masculinity contribute to the transformation of gender inequalities. — Meredeth Turshen, Rutgers University reviewing “Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa”

“In this anthology, scholars juggle regional studies with men’s studies. They question whether Connell’s theories on masculinities can apply to the African continent. In exploring masculinities, they see four lines of inquiry: 1) the idea of the African “big man” is changing; 2) colonialism helped to shape African views on manhood; 3) independence struggles were gendered; and 4) the modern era has affected African masculinities.
This book brilliantly discusses how Africans are subjects, rather than objects. Though whites, imperialists, and colonialists are brought up often, African wars, unionizing, bravery ceremonies, and other willful actions are emphasized. Though Foucault is never mentioned in this book, the idea that power is never absolute resounds clearly here.
Though the editors very consciously view their work as lying within the men’s studies field, in no way are women left out of the picture. The desire to find wives, keep wives, and be with wives is a continual staple of African manhood.
Traditional scholars should not be scared away from this book. Many academics may feel that masculinity is a nebulous topic that should be left for babbling postmodernists. However, this book would satisfy traditional scholars. The book discusses history, economics, and sociology in very concrete ways; it merely adds gender into the broader picture….
I liked this work. I hope more scholarship is produced on African men and other men of the developing world. This was an important intersectional work. I applaud the thinkers paving the way in this burgeoning field.” — Jeffery Mingo on Amazon.com reviewing “Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa “

“She really cares about her students. She recognizes that everyone in the class brings something unique to the class and that all opinions are worth hearing. Her enthusiasm for the subject is contagious, and even though I wasn’t too excited about taking the class at first, it wound up being one of my favorites at Carolina!”…
“Fabulous Prof-one of the best-enthusiastic without being obnoxious, highly intelligent & knowledgeable-she is the reason I chose history as my major!”…
“Professor Lindsay is the best teacher I have had at UNC. She’s lively and funny, and deeply intelligent without being hard to understand. Her common sense approach makes you feel like you understood this all along, you just hadn’t had the information you needed.”…
“Lindsay is by far one of my favorite professors at UNC. She made me switch my major to History. If you really want to learn a lot about Africa, I suggest taking her classes and talking to her about the subject matter apart from class.”…
“One of the best professors I’ve had. Amazing person and truly loves the material she teaches. Sparkling personality and enthusiasm makes subject matter come alive. Teaches clearly and will readily answer questions on the spot if you are confused. Take her classes!”…
“Dr. Lindsay is one of the most inspiring professors I’ve come across at Carolina. Her eyes sparkle when she teaches, and she cares not only about her subject matter, but about her students. I wish the history dept. had 20 more professors like her!” — Anonymous Students

What They’re Famous For

Acclaimed historian Walter Nugent is Emeritus professor of history since 2000 and was the Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, where he has taught since 1984. Before that he was Professor of History at Indiana University for twenty-one years. As a visiting professor he has also taught and lived in England, Israel, Germany, Poland, and Ireland. He has published 11 books and well over a hundred essays and reviews on American and comparative history. In 2000 he was awarded the Caughey prize of Western History Association for best book in Western history for Into the West: The Story of Its People which has been called “the most comprehensive and fascinating account to date of the peopling of the American West.” and an “epic social-demographic history.” He lives with his wife, the historian Suellen Hoy, in Highland Park, Illinois.

Personal Anecdote

Demography is destiny, or so it’s been for me. My enormous good luck is to have become a historian and to have been a faculty member at two excellent research universities. Good demographic timing helped produce this result, starting with being born in 1935, during the Depression. The birth rate was the lowest ever up to then. Whenever people looked for someone from my small cohort, my chances of being picked were always good.

I was also the fortunate beneficiary of discrimination — my mother was forced to quit her elementary-teaching job after she became pregnant with me. As a result, her considerable force and talent as a teacher focused on me, so that I was reading, writing, and reckoning at an early age. Two uncles, one a brother of my mother’s and the other of my father’s, both Catholic priests, also invested in me: one put me through college and saw to it that I learned how to play and sing liturgical music. That let me earn my way through graduate school. The other gave me a spinet piano when I was five and also opened my ears to Beethoven and other great music with his collection of ’78s. Benedictine monks, my undergraduate teachers at a small college in Kansas, opened for me a broad universe of history, literature, and philosophy. Most influential were Brendan Downey, a Missourian with an Oxford degree in English; Victor Gellhaus, a Kansas medievalist whose Ph.D. was from Munich; Peter Beckman, a historian of America and the West; and Eugene Dehner, an inspiring zoologist and ornithologist.

In grad school, I thought I would write a dissertation on whether there was a Catholic side to Progressivism. I did such a lousy job on my orals in that field that the faculty member I’d talked to (lengthily) about it said, “forget it.” I realized much later that the topic would have been a quagmire; I was extremely lucky to have failed my way out of it. Instead, with some personal knowledge of small farmers on the Great Plains, I decided to see if sources substantiated the then-current idea that the 1890′s Populists had been anti-Semites and nativists. I returned to Kansas, and found out that they weren’t (though some others were). This produced a dissertation, a book (The Tolerant Populists), and job offers. Again, demography favored me. Baby-boomers were entering college, enrollments were soaring, and the job market for young would-be academics was hotter than ever before or since.

Indiana University became my home for over twenty years. Then and now, it has had strong international programs. For nine years I had the honor and pleasure of directing its Overseas Study Programs. Watching the huge changes in hundreds of undergraduates who went on junior-year programs, from provincials to young cosmopolitans, was probably the most rewarding work I ever did as an educator. Travels to programs also brought invitations to lecture in Europe and Israel. In the mid-1980s, just under fifty (a good age for such invitations), the University of Notre Dame asked me to become dean of its College of Arts and Letters, which brought with it an endowed chair. I wisely decided that I’d had enough of administration and declined. But when they offered me the endowed chair anyway, I accepted and enjoyed a decade and a half of well-supported research and teaching.

After my book on Populism, the next two were in Gilded-Age economic history. Then, while I was a dean at Indiana, I turned to textbook projects. Some collapsed; others became books (e.g., From Centennial to World War, on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era). A long effort to write a text for the American history survey course fizzled out, but during it I became convinced of the great importance of the demographic substrate of passing events. This led me both to quantitative data and to Braudel. American history, it seemed to me, could be arranged into three plateaus, defined by declining rates of population growth. Just then I was invited to give the 1979 Paley lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the three-fold scheme became the lectures, called “The Graying of America,” and then a small book, Structures of American Social History (1981).

Next came migration. Still influenced by Braudel, I wrote Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870-1914 (1991), which treated the Atlantic and the lands around it – Europe, North America, South America – as a unified arena of human motion and action in the “age of steam.” During those years I also wrote essays on comparative migration and settlement, the processes that formed the American West. People came there from all points of the compass; the traditional east-to-west Turnerian story did not explain it. The result was Into the West: The Story of Its People (1999). About then, I retired from teaching and indulged myself by writing a family history, pulling together about twenty-five years of sporadic archival research into Making Our Way (2003). My current project is to connect the territorial acquisitions of the United States since 1782 to the process of settlement. The continental acquisitions ended in 1854 and the settlement process in the 1920s, but offshore acquisitions continued past 1945 and global empire-building into our own day. The new book will be called The Habit of Empire.

If my luck continues to hold, I will continue writing history through my eighth decade and beyond, as have exemplars such as Ed Morgan, Bob Remini, Bill McNeill, and Bernie Weisberger. If it doesn’t, I can always be thankful for an enormously satisfying (as well as lucky) life as a historian. And I haven’t even mentioned my family. That’s for another time.

Quotes

By Walter Nugent

The Populists have been accused of nativism, both of a personal kind and of an ideological kind; instead, they were friendlier and more receptive to foreign persons and foreign institutions than the average of their contemporary political opponents. They have been accused of ‘conspiracy-mindedness’; for them, however, tangible fact quite eclipsed neurotic fiction. They have been accused of anti-Semitism, both personal and ideological; instead they consistently got along well with their Jewish neighbors and consistently refrained from extending their dislike of certain financiers, who happened to be Jews, to Jews in general. They have been accused of chauvinism and jingoism, especially with reference to the Spanish-American War; instead, such lukewarm support as they gave collectively to Cuban intervention was based on quite different grounds, and as a group they strongly opposed the imperialism that the war engendered…. In the case of Kansas, the largest of the wheat-belt Populist states, the… principal criticisms of Populism voiced by recent writers… should be replaced with a viewpoint so much in contrast as to be practically the opposite…. [T]he Populists of Kansas … were people who were seeking the solution of concrete economic distress through the instrumentality of a political party…. This involved profoundly the political co-operation of the foreign-born, and it involved a deep respect and receptivity for non-American institutions and ideas. — Walter Nugent in “The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism” (1963)

Anyone who has undertaken historical research or who has prepared a set of course lectures in history knows that these things involve a creative process…. But the beginning undergraduate… does not realize this. History is something fixed on a printed page; how it arrived there he seldom asks, and when he does ask he can find no answer. In his beginning chemistry or zoology course he is treated to something very different…. he finds himself in a laboratory where he must himself become involved…. If it is important for him to know how science is done, shouldn’t it also be worth knowing how history is done? — Walter Nugent in “Creative History: An Introduction to Historical Study” (1967)

The subject of this book is the response of groups in American society to changing social conditions in the years immediately following the Civil War…. In order to sketch these group changes… I will relate them here to a question of public policy that was also an economic issue, and a moral issue. This was, in contemporary language, the “money question”… fundamentally the question of what the proper standard of money ought to be. For various reasons, to be described, this was very close to saying what the proper moral standard ought to be. — Walter Nugent in “Money and American Society, 1865-1880″ (1968)

The central observation of the book [is]… that the rate of population growth, although nearly always declining since the seventeenth century, did not drop steadily or constantly. The decline instead forms a pattern of several sudden drops from higher to lower plateaus. That pattern allows us to divide American history into periods in a new way and on a solid factual base. This book is not a full-scale demographic history, but a framework for a social history based on a demographic observation. — Walter Nugent in “Structures of American Social History” (1981)

…[I]f, as Braudel demonstrated, the Mediterranean was the brilliant center of the late sixteenth-century world, surely the Atlantic was the center of the late nineteenth…. Here… is the demographic mosaic of the transatlantic region from 1870 to 1914…. That region, for present purposes, includes Europe, North America, South America, and to a slight degree Africa. All of the societies of the region experienced natural demographic growth, that is, more births than deaths, but at widely varying rates. They also experienced change through migration, some as donors of people, others as receivers, and a few as both…. The cumulative picture of movement is one of a swarming or churning of people back and forth across the Atlantic highway, fed by growing railroad networks on either side of it. –- Walter Nugent in “Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870-1914″ (1992)

Into the West describes how the [American] West got its people: why they came and mostly stayed. What myths, ideals, and dreams drove them there? Who were they? Why did they make the West more urban, earlier, than almost anywhere else in the country? How did it become more ethnically and racially diverse than any other region…? How did the West lead the nation’s profound change from a farming people to city dwellers and suburbanites, for the West was the final, most concentrated cockpit of that transformation?…. This book is not driven by any thesis. But it does have one continuing plot line, which is also a premise and a hope. The briefest way to phrase it is e pluribus unum. … The national center of gravity has shifted and continues to shift. The worldview westward, from Manhattan to vagueness, no longer suffices. The myth of homesteading has already been consigned to the past, and gold rushing, California dreaming, and the macho cowboy are overdue for overhaul. A new national story, one that must include all the American people, whatever their ancestors’ origins, is also overdue. — Walter Nugent in “Into the West: The Story of Its People” (1999)

If this story has a moral, it may be: don’t be shocked at whom your grandchildren marry or how well they do. –- Walter Nugent in “Making Our Way: A Family History of Nugents, Kings, and Others” (2003)

About Walter Nugent

“Conceding that Kansas Populists were sometimes ‘confused, ill-informed, and behind the times,’ the author nevertheless makes a vigorous defense of their basic rationality and common sense – and this without rudeness or discourtesy to writers of the opposite persuasion. He denies that the Populists retreated to a dream world of ‘agrarian Arcadias,’ or that paranoiac thinking was characteristic of them…. His book is an even-tempered and valuable contribution to the literature on Populism.” –- C. Vann Woodward in Mississippi Valley Historical Review, on “The Tolerant Populists”

“Its greatest value lies in his demolition of the charge that Populists, at least those in Kansas, were anti-Semitic, anti-alien, and xenophobic.” –- Paul. W. Gates in Political Science Quarterly, on “The Tolerant Populists”

“On the level of the narrative itself, there is no doubt that Nugent has made a solid and fresh contribution to historical knowledge…. His scholarship is generally sound, his prose is vigorous, and he clarifies the internal relationship between the various aspects of the money question in a coherent synthesis. Most important, he keeps the subject more firmly in international context than any of his predecessors, combining his American materials with original work in European archives…. The book is a welcome and useful addition to the cumulative scholarship that is re-shaping our understanding of political and economic developments in the post-Civil War period.” –- Morton Rothstein in Political Science Quarterly on “Money and American Society, 1865-1880″

What gives Nugent’s book its distinctive character is the author’s use of the money question to explain why the 1870s constituted a ‘watershed of the future.’ Although well aware that other factors were present, Nugent contends that, in the context of the depression, it was the money question that ‘turned Arcadia into a battlefield.’ The monetary discourse of the 1870s was to be echoed in the 1890s, and its ‘spawn… were hardened rhetoric, class divisions, social antagonism, and the inability to consider a serious, wide, and realistic range of answers to the social concerns of the time.’” — Sidney Fine in Journal of American History, on “Money and American Society”

Professor Nugent’s rather inexpressive title conceals a study which should be read by all historians of the United States. It may be that a handful of them who have been trained in demographic skills will be acquainted with what he has to say; the rest, if they are honest with themselves, will find that in brief compass he has marshaled an array of facts and figures about America’s population which will force rigorous rethinking about the main trends and many of the formative factors in the development of the country. … [B]y relating each and every development in the population story to its social and economic antecedents or consequences it compels a reconsideration of the factors which lie at the heart of the American experience and obliges historians to think again about which of them are significant. -– The Economist (London), on “Structures of American Social History”

[G]iven the present state of historical research in American demographic development, this small volume is an extremely useful survey of what we know and, by implication at least, of what we do not know about the subject…. This book deserves to be popular among both those seeking a general introduction to the demographic foundations of social history and among historians and graduate students in search of research topics. — Allan G. Bogue in American Historical Review, on “Structures of American Social History”

“Nugent’s work is the ideal – the only – narrative companion to any quantitative analysis of late-nineteenth century population movements in the Atlantic economy. Crossings is a first, an ambitious and well-executed attempt to condense, synthesize, and re-examine from an international comparative perspective the captivating stories of the millions on the move in the age of mass migration.” –- Alan M. Taylor in Journal of Economic History on “Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870-1914″

“This is a well-researched, wide-ranging, and serious study of migration from Europe to America (North and South)…. The U.S. experience is compared to immigration to Canada, Argentina, and Brazil and is found to be different but not unique or exceptional. The study emphasizes strong underlying similarities in immigration to North and South America in employment patterns, the effect of the expanding frontier, and the demographic structure of the immigrant population. Nugent… has given us a brilliant analysis of a critical chapter of migration history…. — Ira Glazier in American Historical Review on “Crossings”

Nugent’s primary purpose is ‘to pull together in one place the main contours of population change in the Atlantic region,’ 1870 to 1914, and to test the validity of two interpretive concepts, American exceptionalism and the theory of demographic transition, a corollary of modernization theory…. [T]he author succeeds admirably well in achieving his goals…. Nugent’s study, well illustrated and documented, deserves a wide readership and will become a must for courses on migration history. It is analytically incisive and illuminating by its comparative approach. It also stands as a model on how to overcome national narrowness.” — Dirk Hoerder in International Migration Review on “Crossings”

“Walter Nugent’s Into the West is an engaging and important book about “how the West got its people.” It is not really a demographic history, nor is it simply a history of migration, although Nugent gives at least some account of virtually every western immigrant group. It is instead an attempt to discern the motives involved in movement: why people came and why they stayed. And since motives do not translate directly into results, it tries to discern the actual results of the demographic churning of the western part of the continent…. Nugent writes compellingly about homesteading and agrarian settlement, a topic that has largely gone out of fashion…. He points to California with its own distinctive tradition of latifundia as another, longer lasting version of rural society and agricultural landholding. -– Richard White in Journal of American History on “Into the West”

U.S.-Israel Educational Foundation (the Fulbright Program in Israel), Board of Directors, 1985-89.
Organist, St. Bride’s Church, Chicago, 1955-57, 1958-61.
Hadassah Associates (life member).
Contributor to professional journals since 1962
Referee or consultant to various publishers and journals; to universities on tenure and promotion cases.
Member of peer review panels for Council on International Exchange of Scholars (the Fulbright Program), National Endowment for the Humanities, Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, the Huntington Library;
Member of various book- and article-prize committees of the Western History Association, United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa, Agricultural History Society.
Member, Council on Foreign Relations (New York), 1984-99.

Andrew Stuart Bergerson, 39

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Associate Professor, History Department, University of Missouri, Kansas City, Affiliated Faculty in the Judaic Studies and Women & Gender Studies ProgramsArea of Research: Modern German History; History of Everyday Life, Material Culture, Space, & Place; Cultural, Ethnographic, & Oral History; Memory; Interdisciplinarity; Critical TheoryEducation: 1998, Ph. D, University of Chicago, Modern German historyMajor Publications: Bergerson is author of Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: the Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim (Indiana University Press, 2004) New Research Project “The Cultural History of German Bread in the Twentieth Century” and a monograph, “Alt-Hildesheim: a history of normalcy in modern Europe” and a novel, “Plain Sight.”Awards: Bergerson is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including:
2006, Research Grant/Research Leave Winter-Summer, Hildesheim, University of Missouri Research Board;
2005, Short-listed for the First Annual Modernist Studies Book Prize, for: Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times;
2005, UMKC Trustee’s Faculty Fellowship Award;
2004, Mentoring Honor (student selected), Meriweather Lewis Fellow (Faculty Development),UMKC, Spring;
2001, Summer Study Grant for research on the Cultural History of German Bread in Ulm & Tübingen, Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst;
2000, Faculty Research Grant, Office of Research Administration, UMKC;
1993-94, 2-year, dissertation research grant, Friedrich-Weinhagen Stiftung, Hildesheim;
1995-97, Van Holst Prize Lectureship, & DAAD Competition for the Best Syllabi in German Studies (2nd Place) for “The Rapprochement of History & Anthropology in German Studies” (with Matti Bunzl & Daphne Berdahl);
1992, Summer Mellon Research Grant, Hildesheim;
1991, Wilhelm Meister Prize for the Screenplay “A Century of Karl May,” Germanic Languages and Literature Department, University of Chicago. Additional Info:
In 1998-99, Bergerson was a Visiting Assistant Professor, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA; 1995-98, Adjunct Faculty or Lecturer, Columbia College, Chicago, IL; Governors State University, University Park, IL; Loyola College in Maryland, Baltimore, MD; University of Chicago, Chicago, IL.
2004, Television Broadcast Interview, “Ordinary Germans,” The College Hour, 17 December, Channel 17.
In 2003-04, Bergerson did radio interviews for “Talking History,” which included shows on; Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (2002); Bevin Alexander, How Wars are Won: the 13 Rule of War, (2002); William H. Colby, The Long Goodbye: The Deaths of Nancy Cruzan,(2002). Harold James, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression, (2001), and Harry D. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: modernity, cultural practice, and the question of everyday life, (2000).
In 2002 Bergerson did a radio broadcast lecture, “‘Das hat das Volk erst gar nicht mitgekriegt': Erinnerung und Wissen um Barbarei,” Radio Dreyeckland Freiburg FM 102.3.

Personal Anecdote

Jürgen Ludewig a pseudonym loved history. He regularly participated in an adult-education class in the local historical museum in Hildesheim, Germany. While I was conducting research there for my dissertation in 1992-4, the teacher of those courses recommended that I interview him. Heide Kaiser, then a student of museum science at the local university, also recommended Jürgen as an interview partner. But she also warned me: he is to be enjoyed with care “er ist mit Vorsicht zu geniessen.” During the interviews, Jürgen turned out to be quite a cunning character. He accommodated himself to the system, be it fascist or democratic, as the situation demanded, and skeptically denied the existence of any ideal moral positions worthy of sacrifice. In many ways I found Jürgen harder to handle than Helmut a 100% Nazi. At least I knew where I stood with Helmut. And yet most Germans were like Jürgen, ethically ambiguous. More accurately, everyday life is often that complicated.

One day in 1993, before my interviews with Jürgen began, Heide and I ran into him at a museum exhibition. He had spoken to us separately about visiting him in his house to view “The Immortal Heart,” a movie directed by Veit Harlan and filmed in Hildesheim in 1938. Jürgen, it turned out, was an avid film connoisseur: he had a copy of the final cut of this movie in his extensive video library and promised to tell us about how he had watched the filming in his youth.

The ethical problem with “The Immortal Heart” is not just a matter of the striking similarity between its motifs and Nazi propaganda, but also its functionality in Nazi society. Within months of filming it in Hildesheim, the Nazi regime initiated a massive antisemitic pogrom‹the so-called Night of Broken Glass. By offering Hildesheimers this romantic fantasy-image of their town, Harlan disguised the violent realities of the Third Reich and indirectly helped the regime realize its racist goals. Yet it was Jürgen and his neighbors who first adopted the habit of imagining that they lived in Alt-Hildesheim, a premodern, cultivated, yet fantastic town. While watching the filming of “The Immortal Heart” in 1938, Jürgen imagined the disclosure, by modern technology, of a historically romantic citiscape that he and his neighbors had already learned to see.

After watching the movie in 1993, Jürgen tried to convince us that “The Immortal Heart” was not a Nazi film. At first, Heide argued with him as I listened in silence, but both of us soon thanked him for his hospitality and excused ourselves in frustration. Once we were alone in her car, Heide and I spoke of our mutual outrage. In his youth Jürgen had collaborated with the Nazis, and in his maturity he continued to justify this behavior. Then the conversation took a surprising turn. Heide did not understand why I had remained silent while Jürgen tried to justify his past. She asked whether I also let unrepentant Nazis make outright antisemitic comments during the interview process. I responded that I did, that it was not my role to try to change my interview partners from fascists into democrats, and that I could not do so even if I were to try. They had lived for eighty or more years one way; one conversation with me would not change their ways. Defensively I argued that, were I to challenge their politics in the interview process, I would not create trust and they would not speak honestly into my tape recorder. I would be ruining the purpose of the interviews. I could criticize them only after the interviews were done for instance, in my written analysis. Heide appreciated my opinion, but she was not convinced. She felt uncomfortable giving Nazis and their collaborators any opportunity to excuse their past behavior in the public sphere. In 1997 I wrote Heide, asking her to respond to my retelling of this story at the annual meeting of the Association for Integrative Studies. In her reply (11 January 1998), she explained her behavior that afternoon: “Given my conviction that National Socialism was possible because Nazi ideas had become tolerable for discussion in polite company “salonfähig” and everyone else had grown silent, I could not and had no intention of restraining myself. I had to contradict Herr Ludewig.”

To fully appreciate this comment, the reader needs to understand that Heide was raised in a postfascist society: one that is still living in the shadow of fascism, in which any respected elder, perhaps even parents or grandparents, could be a disguised murderer. So she has learned never to trust anyone over a certain age. She has also come to believe that democracy requires civic activism: she instinctively responds to fascist rhetoric with public display of democratic virtues. Though a student of museum science, she is also part of the movement of “Alltagsgeschichte.” Since the 1970s these younger researchers, amateur historians, and civic activists have been fighting to reveal the local Nazi past against an entrenched reign of silence. They seek to prevent an artificial, intellectual foreclosure on this traumatic past and to promote democratic consciousness in their communities. There are a variety of such groups in Hildesheim, for example. They have created walking tours of the local Nazi past, restored and preserved Jewish cemeteries, met survivors of Nazi terror, run intergenerational and interconfessional discussion groups, and, of course, conducted research projects in oral history. Through authentic encounters with the Nazi past, these groups try to make that past accessible and relevant to people today. Yet the everyday life historian’s interest in authenticity can be troubling, as Heide is continually reminded. By 1998, she was working at a memorial-museum located on the site of a former Naziconcentration camp. In her letter (1998), she explained that she finds herself always confronted with the desire for clear answers as to good and evil, having to endure the contradiction of wanting to preserve the remains of a horrible past, and trying to keep in mind the question of my own political and scientific intentions. That is, both the Nazi past and the everyday life history movement trying to preserve its memory raise the question at stake here in stark terms: does an authentic experience with the past, through a visit to the site of mass murder or a narrative interview with an eye-witness, in fact foster liberal values and civic virtues?

In the case of our visit with Jürgen, the answer seemed to have been: no. Jürgen insisted that “The Immortal Heart” was not a Nazi film, because he wanted to believe that Alt-Hildesheim had never been a Nazi place. In 1938, he was busy imagining a medieval dreamworld while the Jews of Hildesheim were being robbed, brutalized, and deported to concentration camps. In the 1990s, he still watched “The Immortal Heart” for the same reason: to forget the ethical complications of everyday life, past and present. Jürgen is addicted to this fantasy, and he tried to addict two young historians to it as well to validate his non-ethic of escapism. Heide and I responded with an analogous self-justification: we reasserted our antifascist positions by judging Jürgen to be a Nazi collaborator. The irony of this story is that this intergenerational encounter did not transform our values or virtues. Instead, all three of us repressed precisely what made the Nazi era so disturbing: having to make ethical choices when none of the options seemed reasonable. I am an historian of everyday life now. For my part, however, I can also now see that I did not keep my polite silence with Jürgen just for the sake of recording a truthful account of the past. This authentic encounter with the past had revealed a panoply of ethical conundrums, and I hid my anxiety about them behind a disciplinary obsession with facticity. My ongoing research agenda uses anthropology, critical theory, cultural studies, philosophy and sociology to engage historical questions about how ordinary people negotiate everyday life in the violent context of modern German history.

Quotes

By Andrew Stuart Bergerson

“”Serious revolutionaries know that a new political, social, or economic order requires new manners. Establishing a dictatorship through a coup d¹etat is one matter, but there can be no totalitarian revolution without an equally essential change in ways of life. I use the term totalitarian not to emphasize similarities between fascism and communism, but to distinguish it from the more general category of dictators. I see a significant difference between a terror state based primarily on formal authority seized from above and one grounded also in informal dynamics for laying claim to power and status from below, such that coordinated processes in state and society affirm and enforce each other. This book tells the story of that everyday, cultural revolution: of the transformation of a civil society into a fascist-racist community imbued with the principles of national socialism.” — Andrew Stuart Bergerson in “Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: the Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim”

About Andrew Stuart Bergerson

This work intends to serve as “both a classic history of the Nazi revolution” and “a cultural history of everyday life.” Focusing on the second of these goals in the narrow context of a single German town means that Bergerson’s “classic history” lacks any serious discussion of Hitler, the Nazi Party, or Germany’s politics, economy, or international relations. But if readers accept Hildesheim as remarkably characteristic of interwar Germany, and if 200 hours of taped interviews with 36 representative Hildesheimers provides sufficient evidence, the book has many interesting and provocative things to say about how the town both facilitated and experienced Nazism. Ordinary people’s desire for status and power, not just Berlin’s dictates, made it possible for German society to go fascist. To make this central point, Bergerson skillfully deploys the tools of historical anthropology, minutely dissecting sociability, civility, conviviality, and the many rituals of social intercourse to chart the sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic, changes in the life of the town. Salutations, human and animal waste, uniforms, strolling, shopping, style of dress, flags, and insignias are mined for meaning. Whether Bergerson’s unorthodox methodology succeeds in answering the important questions pertaining to the Third Reich remains an open question. — R. S. Levy, University of Illinois at Chicago reviewing “Ordinary Germans in extraordinary times: the Nazi revolution in Hildesheim”

“A well crafted, historically accurate, behind the scenes look at life during the the rise of Nazi Germany. I felt it adressed a view that few talk about in this day and age. A thought provoking read!” — Reader review of “Ordinary Germans in extraordinary times: the Nazi revolution in Hildesheim”

“Bergerson is an amazingly good lecturer, a brilliant scholar, and a demanding instructor. Bergerson can show you the characteristics, consequences, and causes behind historical events, people, and movements–which takes your understanding to new depths.”…”Knows his stuff, makes you work, and passionate.”… “Dr. Bergerson is a terrific scholar and his document-based classes are incredibly revealing if you actually bother to read. He will help anyone who asks. By the way, he just got a book published; be assured, he WILL get tenure, and we’re lucky to have him.”…”generally a very good, interesting teacher and genuinely helpful.” — Anonymous Students

What They’re Famous For

Winthrop D. Jordan is the William F. Winter Professor of History F.A.P. Barnard Distinguished Professor Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Mississippi. He received his AB from Harvard University, his MA from Clark University, and his Ph.D. from Brown University where he was awarded the Distinguishing Alumnus citation from the Graduate School. Jordan was briefly an Instructor of history at Phillips Exeter Academy and later a Professor of history at University of California, Berkeley, 1963-82, where he was also Associate Dean for Minority Group Affairs Graduate Division., 1968-70. He is the author of several books, including the award winning and groundbreaking White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 and Tumult And Silence At Second Creek, he is also the co-author of several textbooks for junior high and high school students. Jordan is the recipient of seven book awards, including the National Book Award and a two time winner of the Bancroft Prize.

Jordan retired from teaching in 2004. To mark this event his former students edited and contributed essays as a tribute to the career of one of America’s great thinkers and perhaps the most influential American historian of his generation. The anthology was published in 2005 as Affect and Power: Essays on Sex, Slavery, Race, and Religion in Appreciation of Winthrop D. Jordan. In the introduction Sheila L. Skemp described Jordan’s impact on his students: “Jordan’s legendary seminar-an introduction to the discipline, a requirement for every M.A. student in the Department of History, and experience no student will easily forget… He teaches his students to have an open mind about just what those voices from the past are saying. No matter how relevant his own work is, Jordan never allows his own political or ethical agenda to interfere with his reading of the sources, and he urged his students to put their own preconceived notions aside as well. When their work led them in new directions and they arrived, often despite themselves, at unexpected conclusions, no one was more delighted than Jordan to discover that common wisdom is neither infallible nor particularly wise.”

Personal Anecdote

My distinguished medical career ended when as a college sophomore I got a D- in Chem 1A. I took no history courses in college. Partly this was owing to being a history professor’s son, but also because I had taken a great deal of history at the secondary school level. Yet the principal reason was that Harvard offered a much less demanding major in its new Department of Social Relations. That major offered an appealingly wide range of courses in the social sciences and, fully as important, a lot less work. I spent nearly as much time singing with the Harvard Krokodiloes as going to classes.

After graduating in Social Relations I spent nearly a year in a home-office management training program at the Prudential Life Insurance Company. After several months at their headquarters in Newark, I realized that my interests and abilities were less than a good fit with bureaucratic management. So I cast about for a job teaching something ? anything (perhaps English, Physics, French, or History) ? at a prep school. Serendipitously, it turned out that Phillips Exeter was looking for someone to teach history, and we agreed that I should start work on an M.A. in U.S. history at Clark University. Teaching the extremely bright students at Exeter led me toward getting a Ph.D. In a stroke of good fortune I was denied admission at Harvard and then chose Brown because I was admitted there. I gradually became aware of how lucky I was, as I became interested in early American history because of the marvelous books at the John Carter Brown Library. Also, perhaps because of my undergraduate acquaintance with cultural anthropology, I found dealing with the 16th-18th centuries interesting and intellectually profitable because their denizens lived in cultures so different from modern ones.

At that time (the latter 1950s) the field of history was still dominated by my fellow male “WASPS.” In the 1960s I enthusiastically welcomed signs of broadening in the profession and especially the slackening of the outrageous, falsely genteel anti-Semitism that had sapped the moral integrity of the old establishment.

Thus my undergraduate background meant that my approach to history was strongly influenced by the social sciences of the early 1950s. For my Ph.D. dissertation, I chose a subject that I thought of as a study of an old culture which was still imposing a crushing weight on the nation’s publicly stated political and moral ideals. More particularly, I aimed to understand the large component of emotion and indeed irrationality that characterized the attitudes of the white majority toward “Negroes” in this country. Certainly “ideas” mattered in such an investigation, but they were often so blatantly absurd (especially in the “Age of Reason”) that I was constantly led to pondering the cultural dimensions of affect concerning “race.” No doubt I was influenced by the developing civil rights movement of the late 1950s, though I steered clear of reading much about it in newspapers. More important, the revelations about the wartime Holocaust in Europe loomed over the social sciences in those years; indeed it was no longer possible to think about “racial prejudice” without being acutely aware of the horrifying consequences of politicized anti-Semitism. I thus came to history with intellectual interests and perspectives that virtually dictated the kinds of topics that would engage my attention throughout my historical career. In addition, my mother’s side of the family was still steeped in a Quaker and strongly abolitionist tradition. Less obviously, my exposure to the barbarous prose of the social sciences led to a determination on my part to write in language that at least attempted a measure of grace and clarity.

My dissertation dealt with a matter about which historians had written little. Even after Kenneth Stampp’s revolutionary study, The Peculiar Institution (1956) and the massive amount of research stimulated by Stanley Elkins’s assertions about “Sambo” in his Slavery (1959), white opinions about blacks took a back seat to “black culture,” which by the early 1970s was being called the “hottest field” in historical studies.

Many years after publication of White over Black (1968) I wrote more directly about certain black slaves as they became involved in a conspiracy near Natchez, Mississippi. Over this long period, however, I also published short pieces on “other” subjects that seemed to me closely related to racial attitudes in American culture. These topics included past definitions of the temporal stages of the human life-cycle as well as familial imagery in political thought. Yet there was indeed an intellectual glue that bound such explorations together with my further inquiries into important matters about race that White over Black had failed to cover, including the culture of Tudor England and development of the United States’s unique one-drop racial rule. If I had to name this glue, I would call it “affect.”

Because I had focussed on “thought” that was not intellective, I warmly welcomed a recent retrospective assessment of White over Black by Lawrence Shore in History and Theory which concluded that the book had shown that “if you ignore the evidence it is easy to deny the power of the irrational.” Indeed such persistent denial must be easy, since so many historians had and have been achieving it for years. Denial has recently spilled over into discussions of “race.” I hope soon to write about the modern social and scientific conceptualizations of “race,” which has proven such an appallingly dangerous term that many critics want to ban the word itself and to claim, mistakenly, that it is totally foreign to natural science including evolutionary biology. For present purposes I will merely emphasize that human beings constitute a single entity, whether it is called a single species, a breeding population, a gene pool, children of God, or the family of man. I personally find great value and aptness in all these designations. My doubts arise only in regard to the second term in the species name, Homo sapiens.

Quotes

By Winthrop D. Jordan

This study attempts to answer a simple question: What were the attitudes of white men toward Negroes during the first two centuries of European and African settlement in what became the United States of America? It has taken a rather long time to find out, chiefly because I have had to educate myself about many matters concerning which at the outset I was very ignorant. This book does something to answer the question, but I am aware that it affords only partial illumination. Like most practicing historians today, I have assumed the task of explaining how things actually were while at the same time thinking that no one will ever really know. Which is to say that this book is one man’s answer and that other men have and will advance others. I hope that mine is a reasonably satisfactory one, but I shall be enormously surprised— and greatly disappointed—if I am not shown to be wrong on some matters. — — Winthrop D. Jordan in “White Over Black American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812″

“The dilemma was apparent. Virginia’s distress was then America’s writ large. The white American wanted, indeed had, to remain faithful to himself and to his great experiment. In doing so he was caught between the necessity, on the one hand, of maintaining his identity as the fruit of England’s and Europe’s loins and as the good seed of civilization planted in the wilderness, and on the other, the necessity of remaining faithful to his own image as the world’s exemplar of liberty and equalitarianism, as the best hope of the civilization which he cherished. Whichever path he took he seemed to abandon part of himself, so that neither could be taken with assurance or good conscience. Individual Americans divided according to their private necessities, while at the same time the nation divided in response to pressures generated by economic, demographic, and cultural differences, but no American and no section of America could rest at ease with the decision. For Virginians especially, for many Americans, and for the nation as a whole it was impossible to make a clearcut choice. Within every white American who stood confronted by the Negro, there had arisen a perpetual duel between his higher and lower natures. His cultural conscience–his Christianity, his humanitarianism, his ideology of liberty and equality–demanded that he regard and treat the Negro as his brother and his countryman, as his equal. At the same moment, however, many of his most profound urges, especially his yearning to maintain the identity of his folk, his passion for domination, his sheer avarice, and his sexual desire, impelled him toward conceiving and treating the Negro as inferior to himself, as an American leper. At closer view, though, the duel appears more complex than a conflict between the best and worst in the white man’s nature, for in a variety of ways the white man translated his “worst” into his “best.” Raw sexual aggression became retention of purity, and brutal domination became faithful maintenance of civilized restraints. These translations, so necessary to the white man’s peace of mind, were achieved at devastating cost to another people. But the enormous toll of human wreckage was by no means paid exclusively by the Negro, for the subtle translation of basic urges in the white man necessitated his treating the Negro in a fashion which tortured his own conscience, that very quality in his being which necessitated those translations. So the peace of mind the white man sought by denying his profound inexorable drives toward creation and destruction (a denial accomplished by affirmations of virtue in himself and depravity in the Negro) was denied the white man; he sought his own peace at the cost of others and found none. In fearfully hoping to escape the animal within himself the white man debased the Negro, surely, but at the same time he debased himself.
Conceivably there was a way out from the vicious cycle of degradation, an opening of better hope demanding an unprecedented and perhaps impossible measure of courage, honesty, and sheer nerve. If the white man turned to stare at the animal within him, if he once admitted unashamedly that the beast was there, he might see that the old foe was a friend as well, that his best and his worst derived from the same deep well of energy. If he once fully acknowledged the powerful forces which drove his being, the necessity of imputing them to others would drastically diminish. If he came to recognize what had happened and was still happening with himself and the African in America, if he faced the unpalatable realities of the tragedy unflinchingly, if he were willing to call the beast no more the Negro’s than his own, then conceivably he might set foot on a better road. Common charity and his special faith demanded that he make the attempt. But there was little in his historical experience to indicate that he would succeed. — Winthrop D. Jordan in “White Over Black American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812″

About Winthrop D. Jordan

“The author has put simple solutions and flashy theories aside and brought to his task a patience, skepticism, thoroughness, and humility commensurate with the vast undertaking. He combines these qualities with imagination and insight. The result is a massive and learned work that stands as the most informed and impressive pronouncement on the subject yet made.” — C. Vann Woodward, New York Times Book Review reviewing “White Over Black American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812″

“A monumental work of scholarship, brilliant in conception and execution, humane, convincing, informed by warmth and wit, illuminating reading for all those concerned with America’s tragedy. . . . As an historian with keen psychological insights into his material, Winthrop Jordan is uniquely qualified to illuminate America’s anguished dilemma.” — Publishers Weekly reviewing “White Over Black American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812″

“White Over Black will stand as a landmark in the historiography of this generation. Its richness and insight, its sensitive, penetrating analysis of the unspoken as well as the explicit, its union of breadth with depth, make it a brilliant achievement.” — Richard D. Brown, New England Quarterly

“[A] rare thing: an original contribution to an important subject. In helping us understand today’s racial crisis, Jordan has ideally fulfilled the historian’s function of investigating the past in order to enlighten the present.” — The judges for the 1969 National Book Award for History and Biography

“This monumental study is a tremendously important block, fascinating and appalling, of American social and cultural history. . . . Though the study was begun years before the current civil rights agitation, it is quite indispensable for a full appreciation of the realities and wellsprings and the dilemmas of the contemporary struggle.” — The Phi Beta Kappa Senate award committee for the 1968 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award

“One of the most remarkable feats of detective work achieved by a modern historian.” — David Brion Davis, New York Review of Books reviewing “Tumult and Silence at Second Creek An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy”

“This work represents the reconstruction of history at its very best.” — John Hope Franklin reviewing “Tumult and Silence at Second Creek An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy”

“This book, Winthrop D. Jordan tells us in his opening sentence, “is a story, but at the same time it is not.” With this paradox, Mr. Jordan characterizes the outcome of more than 20 years of investigation into events that occurred nearly a century and a half ago. “Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy” is at once an effort to capture the experience of black and white Mississippians confronting the implications of the Civil War for Southern slavery and also — and perhaps even more fundamentally — an exploration into the nature of historical inquiry and interpretation.
Mr. Jordan, a professor of history and Afro-American studies at the University of Mississippi, has written a work of historical scholarship that leaves its scaffolding standing and visible, a study in which the process of discovery is at least as important as the result. He not only invites the engaged reader to participate in the struggle to understand the past, but he also includes almost all the available evidence in appendixes. — Drew Gilpin Faust reviewing “Tumult and Silence at Second Creek An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy”

“What Jordan brings forth, in more subtlety and detail than space allows to examine here, is the complexity of slave life, of contradictions and ambiguities-both black and white-overloyalty and betrayal, trust and violence, sex and domination, freedom and bondage, oppression and resistance, paternalism and independence, and life and death in the slave South.
This is both a fascinating and fustrating study, fasvcinating for what Jordan is able to wring out of a small handful of skimpy documents, and fustrating for what he is unable to explain because history would surrender nothing further, even to his skilled hands.” — C. Peter Ripley, Florida State University reviewing “Tumult and Silence at Second Creek An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy”

“I think it is so good for us to go back. The issue of slavery is such an enduring topic. Dr. Jordan is a premier historian in the United States. His book ‘White Over Black’ is a model for other historians.” — David Sansing, professor emeritus of history University of Mississippi at the Porter L. Fortune, Jr. History Symposium in 2000

“At the annual meeting of the Organization of American historians, in the Spring of 1998, an overflow crowd gathered to honor the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Winthrop Jordan’s magisterial work, White Over Black. Many of us old folks remembered where we were when the book first appeared, as we marveled at the impact it made on the profession then-an impact that continues to have reverberations even today. Young scholars joined the conversation, acknowledging that their comprehensive exam lists invariably include White Over Black as a “must read.” Audience members and panelists alike commented on the book’s merits and their memories of reading it in graduate seminars or undergraduate courses. The panel continued in an appropriately academic fashion, until a young woman stood up and asked to be heard. She was from the Carribean island of Dominica, and had first encountered White Over Black as a young woman. The book, she said simply changed her life. It was the first thing she had ever read that enabled her to understand herself, who she was. and what her relationship to the rest of the world was all about. The book, moreover, moved her to become a historian, so that she too, could join a community that asked the right questions and, at least on occassion, arrived at the right answers. Most historians would give anything to know that just once their work has had a profound-and positive- effect on someone’s life. Winthrop Jordan experiences that sense of satisfaction more often than most of us.” — Sheila L. Skemp in the introduction for “Affect and Power: Essays on Sex, Slavery, Race, and Religion in Appreciation of Winthrop D. Jordan”

Finally Winthrop Jordan set me off in the right direction as I began this essay as a chapter of my dissertation. His guidance, criticism, and inspiration call for a special debt of gratitude.” — David J. Libby in “Affect and Power: Essays on Sex, Slavery, Race, and Religion in Appreciation of Winthrop D. Jordan”

Basic Facts

Teaching Positions:
Brown University, Providence, RI, lecturer in history, 1959-61; College of William and Mary, Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA, fellow, 1961-63; University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor, 1963-67, associate professor, 1967-69, professor of history, 1969-1982. William F. Winter Professor of History F.A.P. Barnard Distinguished Professor Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Mississippi, 1982-2004.

White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812, (University of North Carolina Press, for Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1968).

The White Man’s Burden, (Oxford University Press, 1974).

Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy, (Louisiana State University Press, 1993).

Editor, Contributor, Joint Author:

(Editor) Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species, Harvard University Press, 1965.

(With Miriam Greenblatt and John S. Bowes) The Americans, the History of a People and a Nation, (Science Research Associates, 1982).

(With others) The United States, (Prentice Hall, 1982).

(With Ernest R. May, James F. Marran, John S. Bowes, Miriam Greenblatt and others) The American People: A History from 1877, (McDougal, 1986).

(With Ernest R. May) The American People: A History to 1877, (McDougal, 1986).

(Editor with Sheila L. Skemp) Race and Family in the Colonial South: Essays, (University Press of Mississippi, 1987).

(With Greenblatt and Bowes) The Americans: A History, (McDougal, 1994).

(Editor) Slavery and the American South : essays and commentaries, (University Press of Mississippi, 2003).

Jordan has also contributed numerous articles and book review to professional journals

Awards:

Jordan’s many awards include fellowships from the Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, as well as a Distinguished Alumnus Citation from Brown University’s Graduate School.
1968, Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, Society of American Historians;
1969, Winner of the National Book Award;
1969, Winner of the Bancroft Prize, Columbia University;
1968, Winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, Phi Beta Kappa all for White Over Black American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812
1993, Winner of the Bancroft Prize;
1993, the Eugene M. Kayden National University Press Book Award;
1992 the Jules and Frances Landry Award all for Tumult and Silence at Second Creek An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy.
1976, Fellowship Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS).

Additional Info:

Jordan worked at Prudential Life Insurance Co., Newark, NY, as a management trainee, 1953-54; and then at Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH, as an instructor in history, 1955-56.

Jordan has been widely reported in the press and has made several appearances on C-Span regarding the debate to whether Thomas Jefferson did in fact father his slave Sally Hemmings’s children, based on his claim in White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968) that “She bore five, from 1795 to 1808; and though he was away from Monticello a total of roughly two-thirds of this period, Jefferson was at home nine months prior to each birth.”